Council needs to monitor development
compliance

Letter to the editor of Cessnock Advertiser
22 October 2014

Regarding the recent music festival at 60 Mitchells Road, Mount View, on
September 10 at an extraordinary meeting, the council approved a traffic
management plan for the event.

This plan had not been submitted to council in the time frame specified
in the DA approval, hence the need for an
extraordinary meeting.

The proponents' traffic management plan, from the outset, was subject to
many basic premises but I will highlight only two of them, namely:
- All traffic would be directed to use a route via
Cessnock/Millfield/Mount View Road to drive to the event and
- Qualified traffic controllers, two-way radios and
appropriate signage would control all event traffic.

The first premise mentioned was to permit the limited use of a water
truck to reduce dust levels from event traffic on the Millfield to Mount
View Road.

However, this premise was immaterial as the vast majority of traffic
approached the event address from other routes (presumably nobody told the
GPS navigation systems everyone uses nowadays of this requirement) and the
event organisers did not alternate the use of the water truck on other
approach roads.

The veracity of the second premise is also very doubtful based on my own
experience mid-morning of September 20.

As I drove slowly towards the intersection between Mount View Road and
Mitchells Road from the southwest I noted what I assumed to be traffic
controllers, but there was no evidence of two-way radios and no hand held
signage was in use.

As I closed on the actual junction of the two roads, a water truck
emerged from Mitchells Road at speed being waved out by hand signals from
the traffic controllers. Had it not been for the fact that I was driving
slowly and cautiously (which the water truck was not) there could
easily have been an accident.

These are only two instances of Cessnock City Council DA conditions
being ignored. But apparently the council does not care, as the following
statement made by the director of planning at the
meeting on September 10 clearly demonstrates: "Council doesn't
traditionally have staff working on weekends in development compliance".

We can only hope that Cessnock City Council continues to look after its
own residents (who are also rate payers and voters) in the Mount View and
all other council areas with far greater care and attention than was shown
on this occasion; or alternately does not approve any DA where it cannot
monitor compliance of the approval conditions i.e. no weekend events.